Free Republic

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

Surrender or antisemite Those are the options being presented by the Israeli ambassador to Hungary. I have no doubt that Hungary will rightly choose the latter. The Israeli ambassador in Budapest has called on the Hungarian government to end its campaign against Jewish billionaire George Soros, which he claims is stoking antisemitic sentiment. The Hungarian government has recently rolled out a nationwide billboard campaign, urging Hungarians to stand firm against the ruinous influence of the Jewish financial speculator.George Soros is well known for his involvement in the open borders campaign, with his Open Society organisation essentially acting as a front...

HOORAY! We lost again!!! A reliable source of humor after Democrats lose elections is Vox writer Matthew Yglesias. A month ago Yglesias was celebrating the loss of the democrat in the Montana special congressional election by declaring his loss to really mean a win for democrats. Yglesias continued mining this political comedy vein by declaring that the loss of Jon Ossoff in the George 6th Congressional District special election, after the party blew over $30 million on his campaign, really means that the "Republicans are in trouble."

HOORAY! We lost!!!That is becoming the laughable mainstream media theme about many special elections since President Donald Trump's victory last November. We saw this happen in early March when Politico hailed Democrat performances in special elections despite the fact that there was no net change. The latest iteration of celebrating participation trophies, and likely to be repeated by MSM sources,  comes by way of the May 26 edition of Vox in which Matthew Yglesias declared that the loss by the Democrat candidate in the congressional special election was beyond mere good news for the Democrats. In fact the Vox headline acclaimed that Republicans'...

Do you remember the time not so very long ago when, according to Democrats and liberals, big money in politics was the most evil thing about our political system? Well that was then. Starting most noticeably during the presidential campaign last Fall when Hillary Clinton outspent the Donald Trump campaign by about two-to-one, Democrats and liberals have developed newfound respect for big money in politics to the extent they now actually brag about it. The latest example is Vox hyping big campaign spending in a March 27 article by Jeff Stein whose very title positively exults that Georgia Dems normally raise...

The story of Milo Yiannopoulos’s fall from conservative grace ended when a conservative blog posted video footage of him making comments that seemed to rationalize pedophilia. But it started when a 16-year-old high school student in Canada decided Yiannopoulos was embraced much too closely by mainstream conservatives. The teen was moved to dig up footage on Yiannopoulos when she heard that he’d been invited to speak at the highest profile gathering of conservatives each year in America, the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). She defines herself as “very socially liberal,” but leans right on economics and foreign policy. Yiannopoulos,...

Talk about a stretch! Or, better, make that a streeeeeeetch. Vox has started a new type of movie review in which they take a film  and try to correrelate it to current events. Since Vox, like the rest of the MSM, is absolutely obessed by President Trump, it is no big surprise that they will apply their TDS to the reviews starting with the current movie: "Dr. Strangelove." To read the review by Alissa Wilkinson you would think Stanley Kubrick's classic dark comedy should have been named "Dr. StrangeTrump or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Donald."...

During his inauguration address on Friday, Donald Trump released an image that had nothing to do with crowd size or marchers: his official White House portrait. The picture, which features prominently in the White House website’s biography of Trump, depicts the President in front of what appears to be a green-screen image of the White House. In his characteristic red tie, Trump leans forward, no smile, with an aggressive — arguably menacing — stare. The image struck us as unusual, so we reached out to some professional photographers and presidential scholars to help us unpack why. The photo is odd,...

If you thought the results of the 2016 election would cause members of the news media to do a bit of soul-searching about the tenor of their coverage, you were wrong. If you thought they might want to understand why their hysterical attempts to take down Donald Trump were all for naught, you were mistaken. And if you thought they were interested in understanding why media trust numbers just hit record lows, you were delusional.After spending weeks post-election complaining about the rise of so-called fake news and attributing Hillary Clinton’s loss to its proliferation, a large number of members of...

President-elect Donald Trump’s businesses provide an unprecedented opportunity for conflicts of interest and even corruption. And he just canceled the news conference where he was supposed to tell Americans how he’d deal with them. On November 30, Trump said that he’d announce his plans for the Trump Organization, his sprawling business empire, on December 15, promising he would be “leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Now that press conference has been canceled, according to Bloomberg Politics’ Kevin Cirilli, Caleb Melby, and Ben Brody. Unnamed...

I’ve started to rewatch Trump rallies from the month before he was elected president. I’ve seen some of them before, but that was always with the presumption he was unlikely to win. Now I watch them trying to figure out how he did it, and how the Democrats can rebuild their economic message out of this mess....

(Snip) As an executive in a low-wage industry dominated by “low-skilled” workers (many of them immigrants, and often unauthorized immigrants), Puzder has been an outspoken supporter of low-skilled immigration to the US — and of immigration reform that would legalize unauthorized immigrants who are already here. (Snip) Puzder is a leading member of the GOP’s pro-immigrant wing — which Trump ran, and won, against In early 2015 (before Trump entered the race), Puzder participated in a press call warning the Republican candidates for president to follow Jeb Bush’s “lead” on immigration. “People vote with their hearts ... our values dictate...

Donald Trump loves the idea of infrastructure. He brings it up all the time. He wants to make an infrastructure bill a priority in his first 100 days as president. And Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have said they’d love to work with him on this."We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals," Trump promised cheering supporters on election night. "We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it."The...

EpiPens, useful medical devices which reverse potentially fatal allergic reactions, have recently quadrupled in price, putting pressure on allergy sufferers and those who care for them. Vox writes that this “tells us a lot about what’s wrong with American health care” – namely that we don’t regulate it enough: The story of Mylan’s giant EpiPen price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America’s unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.Let me ask Vox...

This July 4, let's not mince words: American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it. Of course, evaluating the wisdom of the American Revolution means dealing with counterfactuals. As any historian would tell you, this is a messy business. We obviously can't be entirely sure how America would have fared if it had stayed in the British Empire longer, perhaps gaining independence a century or so later, along with Canada. But I'm reasonably confident a world in which the revolution never happened would be better...

The recent verbal attacks by the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump and his supporters on President Barack Obama for avoiding the phrase "radical Islam" in his public pronouncements are simplistic, racially inflammatory — and flatly misinformed. Settling upon accurate and strategically nuanced terms to describe the post-9/11 enemy is not the product of "political correctness" (contra Trump) or a failure to understand the enemy (contra a much-discussed Atlantic cover story). Nor are objections to using overly broad terms like "Islamic radicalism" limited to Democrats. The Bush administration understood the power of words, too. It concluded that distinctions that may seem...

The nearly 50-year-old union reached no level of stabilization over the weekend and on Monday, the Express reported “the foreign ministers of France and Germany” were revealing “a blueprint to effectively do away with individual member states.” The report said, “Under the radical proposals E.U. countries will lose the right to have their own army, criminal law, taxation system or central bank, with all those powers being transferred to Brussels.” The report said the plot “has sparked fury and panic in Poland … after being leaked to Polish news channel TVP Info.” The report said Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski...

In the wake of the UK’s vote Thursday to leave the EU, comparisons of Brexit's  success to the rise of Donald Trump have been flying far and wide. This is only natural, since anti-immigrant, anti-elite, and nationalist sentiments played major roles in both shocking phenomena. Of course, many of these analogies are too facile. The US faces no comparable controversy over regulations from a transnational economic bureaucracy. The US electorate is much more diverse than Britain’s. Trump himself has massive weaknesses in personality, popularity, and campaign mechanics that an issue-oriented campaign doesn’t. And where "Leave" and "Remain" were essentially...

You are not worthy!!! That pretty much sums up the brutal assessment of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro by Dylan Matthews of Vox. He was listing the pros and cons of various possible running mates for Hillary Clinton. Most of them seemed weighted on the pro side but when it came to Castro, the cons screamed off the page in a most cruel way that overwhelmed whatever pros he has according to Matthews:

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler and Colleen McCain Nelson broke the news that Hillary Clinton is vetting Elizabeth Warren for the vice presidency — but not vetting Bernie Sanders. In the process, they provided a shortlist of candidates that Clinton is considering: Beyond the Massachusetts senator, other prospective candidates include Labor Secretary Tom Perez; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Reps. Xavier Becerra of California and Tim Ryan of Ohio, several Democrats said. Now, this...